ACROSS THE BLOCKADE

I

IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY

Among memories of four months' travel in Cen­tral Europe, a night journey from Vienna to Buda­pest stands vividly out. It was cold, and the heating apparatus of the train did not work. For lack of fuel we traveled in a crawling train. For lack of fuel we were put on a half-ration of light. The covering of the seats had been cut away, as usual, by desperate men in search of material for clothes. The darkness, the cold, the discomfort, the dirt—it was all typical of the condition to which war and the blockade have reduced all Europe east of the Rhine.

Two fellow-passengers sat in the dim light and talked incessantly. They were average members of the once comfortable middle-class, one a small capitalist and the other a doctor, neighbors in a German-Austrian town near the Hungarian fron­tier. What they said was not exceptionally inter­esting, but it filled in for me the picture of daily life of which this desolate train was the frame. They talked at first of clothes and food. Neither had bought a new suit for over three years. The doctor had poor relations, and he had gradually given his wardrobe away: he now possessed only the old suit that he wore. One of the couple from reasons of economy had stopped drinking beer: the other had given up tobacco. As for meat and bacon, they had long ago cut down their three meat meals a day to one: of late the doctor had tried to do without that one.

"What troubles me most," said the capitalist, who had evidently closed down his factory, "is that every day one or another of my old work­men comes to me for help. I can't refuse. But if it goes on much longer, I shall be condemning my own children to starvation."

"Yes," answered the doctor, "there's not much charity left in the world to-day. Homo homini lupus. I performed a difficult operation on a farmer's wife last week. Yesterday I called again. She kissed my hand and said I had saved her life. As I went out, I saw that the farmer was killing a pig. I asked him to sell me a ham. 'I have nothing to spare for strangers,' was the man's answer—and I had just saved his wife's life. . . . We are all getting selfish. I sometimes think men have given too much. . . . The strain has been too great. For four years men have been pouring out life, blood, health, all they had, for their country. If you had sat at their deathbeds, as I had to do in the field-hospital, and taken down their last messages to wife and children as they lay in agony, you would know what this war has cost."

So the desultory talk went on. I will not try to recall the doctor's moving tales of the field-hos­pital, nor his anger against the general staff and the war-makers in Vienna, though that, too, was part of the desolation. The moral capital of these men was gone—the loyalties, the conventions, the megalomania, the clap-trap. They had gone bank­rupt in illusions, and the lies that had sustained them had lost their power.

The doctor was an altruist, but before long the capitalist had brought back the talk to his own sad case. "Think of it, man," he was saying. "Do you realize what the fall of the krone means All we have falls with it. We used to be able to buy 105 francs with 100 kronen, and now we can barely get 17. It's ruin. It means that none of us is worth a fifth of what we had," and then he went on to propound a muddle-headed theory that mortgages at least were safe. The doctor had a clear head, and he tore that imagination to pieces. "Look here," he said, "you advanced 10,000 kronen on a cottage before the war. You paid out kronen that were kronen. To-day, your man pays you back, but he pays you in kronen that are worth only a fifth of their old value. You lose four in five. No, no, mortgages are no safer than anything else." "Then I'm ruined," said the small capitalist, and he sank into gloomy silence till the train drew up at his station.

Half an hour later the train crossed the frontier into Hungary. Flags were flying. There was a strange electric air of animation in the station. On the Austrian side of the line men bent their heads and said that they were ruined. On the Hungarian side they had taken the plunge. Debts and mortgages, loans and share-capital, all the old lumber had gone, and men walked with quicker steps because they were facing a new life. After that conversation in the train I began to under­stand why the opposition to the Social Revolution in Budapest had been so slight. Are one's privi­leges as a"bourgeois" worth defending, when one has had to drop all the small luxuries of life? Does one battle for respectability, when one's wardrobe is reduced to the last three-year-old suit? Does one fight for property when its meas­ure in currency has sunk to 20 per cent.? There are two factors in every revolution, the impetus of the force that makes for change, and conviction of the forces that resist it. When every bourgeois knows already that he is ruined, who is going to rush the Bolshevist barricades?

The Austrian-German is by nature inert, sym­pathetic, artistic, witty, and under happy condi­tions gay, but, he lacks energy and constructive power. Budapest is largely a Jewish town, but its Jewish population, neither persecuted nor iso­lated as in Poland, has dropped orthodoxy and the old Yiddish speech. It has adopted Magyar names, talks Magyar at home, and used to culti­vate a robust Magyar patriotism. It is lively, restless, nervous, energetic, alert to every new thing. It found in Communism the violent stim­ulus which it needed in the hour of despair and defeat. With a nearly unanimous impetus the "intellectuals" (many of them Jews) had flung themselves with the Magyar workmen of the towns into Communism. The thing to us seems inconceivable. One must remember that there is no old middle class in Hungary. There are the recently-rich, the stock-brokers, the war profiteers, the professional men. This society is accustomed to sudden gains and sudden losses. No one save the landed nobility has any long tradition. This race has the gambler's instinct, and any one who has heard Hungarian music knows with what fire the blood of this people moves. Three weeks ago private ownership in capital disappeared in a night. People adapted themselves with amazing versatility to the change. I found the Ministries thronged with eager applicants for jobs. Counts had new visiting cards printed without their titles. Bankers and factory-managers wore red badges in their coats. Ladies of noble family found work as translators or teachers or musicians, and laughed gaily at the discovery that they had a value in the labor market. I spent an afternoon in a salon frequented by landowners who had lost their titles and their estates. The men were far from cheerful, but the women were obviously stim­ulated by the new adventure of looking for work. They had all succeeded, and some had met with kindness on the way. One professed herself al­ready an ardent Communist. Emancipation had come to them unexpectedly and unsought, and they quitted their old empty lives with little regret. I met gloomy people who complained. I heard of suicides, but in the main the mood was one of excitement at the strangeness and novelty of the Revolution. The Government had the wisdom to cultivate a mood of gaiety and rejoicing, and it summoned the arts to its aid. A recruiting procession for the Red Guard was a veritable pageant. The leading actors recited new revolu­tionary poems at the street corners, as the pro­cession halted, and the favorites of the Opera sang in the service of the new idea. One had the irresistible feeling in these bright days of spring, as the music of these festivals floated on the lilac-scented air over the swift Danube, that youth and art, and talent and the creative impulse, were with this spirited movement. There was no mistaking the enthusiasm of the city crowd during these processions and reviews. Every one expected that Vienna would follow Munich and "go Bolshevik" soon (which it will not do), and the general belief was that when the Entente attempts to impose its crushing peace terms, all Europe would seek es­cape in Communism, from the Urals to the Rhine. Budapest felt itself in the fashion. Older men said philosophically (I am quoting a Professor of History, well known in England), "It was inevit­able. It is the fault of the Entente. One must recognize that the era of capitalism is finally over in Central Europe. We can adjust ourselves to Communism. The happy thing is that the change, thanks to Bela Kun, has come in such an orderly way."

It is common form in the oratory and journa­lism of the West to identify Bolshevism and anar­chy. The traveler who enters Communist Hun­gary with that illusion is destined to a crescendo of disappointment. There is in Europe to-day no city more monotonously orderly than Budapest, and the stranger who expected confusion emerges in the end a little stifled by the oppressive order. The Communism which prevails in Hungary re­flects the later phases of the Russian Revolution. Its first principle is authority, and with all the enthusiasm of a new faith it is creating also a more than Roman discipline. The daily papers have been turned into gazettes which devote inter­minable columns to the edicts and legislation of the new Government. Page after page is filled with "orders" which regulate every phase of life from the distribution of boots to the repertoire of the theater. Their tone is sharp and per­emptory, and most of them contain a threat which has become a commonplace of Communist style—that the least resistance will be punished by death. The official smiles as he pens the conven­tional words, for in point of fact after three weeks of proletarian dictatorship only one death sen­tence has been passed by the revolutionary tri­bunal, and even that has not been executed. The only people who have been shot were two or three Red Guards who attempted to pillage. The strange thing is that these orders are obeyed. Tips are forbidden, and waiters actually return them with a gesture of outraged virtue. Alcohol is prohibited, and no one dares to drink. There is no terror, for there is no resistance. A lead­ing Communist explained to me with a good deal of humor why they had succeeded in imposing obedience without bloody severity. "The bour­geois Press," he said, "did our terrorism for us. For months before the Revolution, it had been publishing its interminable inventions about the Red Terror in Russia. The result was that every one believed that Communists are cannibals or worse. The result is that we are spared the trouble of being severe. We have only to speak to be obeyed." The essential difference between Russia and Hungary lies in the fact that the Hungarian proletariat was from the first united. There are no Mensheviki and no Social Revolu­tionaries in Hungary, and consequently there has been no attempt to sabotage by the intellectuals. The Social Democrats and the Communists fused their separate organizations at the moment of the Revolution to form a united Socialist party. The orthodox Socialists supplied the numbers, the Communists the driving force. The new move­ment stepped into a political vacuum. Defeat and the collapse of Magyar Imperialism had ruined all the parties of the old régime. Even the Left had abdicated. The Radicals had already dis­solved their party organization before the coup d'etat and had rallied to the support of the So­cialists. The other parties had been shattered by the catastrophic end of the war and the assassi­nation of Count Tisha. Morally and materially the old order was bankrupt.

To see the Communist Revolution in its his­torical perspective, we must understand the ex­perience through which Hungary had passed be­tween October and March. The autumn Revolu­tion had broken with the feudal past. Universal suffrage, after a generation of struggle, had come at last, and the long oppression of the subject races was ended for all time. Even in the hour of disaster, however, the Magyars had found it hard to believe that the Entente would really dismember their country. The integrity of the lands that belonged to St. Stephen's Crown was a sacro­sanct superstition. For the utmost concessions in the shape of Home Rule for Slovaks, Roumani­ans, and Serbs the Magyars were prepared, but not for the final alienation of the territories in­habited by these races, which happen to include some of the richest cornlands, together with the few coal-mines of Hungary. The ruling caste was prepared to acquiesce in the choice of Count Michael Karolyi as President of the Republic, largely because it imagined that his reputation would conciliate the Entente. It certainly ought to have done so. Though himself an aristocrat, linked by birth and marriage to the ruling oligarchy, he had always battled manfully and honestly for an honest, democratic franchise. Throughout the war, with astonishing courage, he had made openly pacifist speeches in the Diet, and had op­posed the Prussian-Magyar alliance. The En­tente, however, was in no way placated by the choice of Karolyi. I met him in Budapest and heard his story from his own lips. Evidently a man of independence and force of character, he is also a good talker and has a perfect command of English. Early in his brief period of power he had met the French General Franchet d'Esperey, who commanded in the East, only to encounter that insolence which we used to consider a pecu­liarly Prussian characteristic. Throughout the winter the blockade was maintained in full rigor, though the whole Hungarian army had been dis­banded. The material sufferings of this armistice period were infinitely worse than those of the war, for now the little central area of purely Magyar Hungary was isolated, and cut off from all its normal sources of supply. Fuel was al­most unobtainable, and, as Karolyi put it, the task of finding just enough coal to provide Buda­pest with a minimum of light and power was "a daily anguish." The cold months went by, in ever-growing want and despair. The Roumani­ans, had occupied Transylvania, and as its Mag­yar and German inhabitants (not much, if at all, less than half the population of the occupied area) fled from the harsh rule of the invaders, Budapest was overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of refugees, who had all to be housed and fed. The more moderate Socialists had joined the Radicals in forming a Coalition Cabinet but the Left Wing and the Communists were working outside it for a social revolution. Two considerations, as he told me, influenced Karolyi to make his startling gesture of despair in the last week of March, when he resigned his office as President of the Republic and handed over power to a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. One of them was a certainty that the Revolution must presently come, with his as­sent or without it: he preferred that it should come bloodlessly. The other was the perception that the Entente was determined to impose a Peace of Strangulation, under which it would be impossible for Hungary to live. Two events pre­cipitated his decision. One of them was the ar­rival of a Note, couched in dictatorial language (it opened with the words J'ordotme), in which the British naval commander of the Danube or­dered the Hungarians to hand over their whole river mercantile fleet of tugs and barges to the Tchechs. The Tchechs had forced their way down through alien country to the Danube, had an­nexed the purely German river side port of Press-burg on the borders of Austria and Hungary, and now proposed to set up in business as river-carriers by appropriating the vessels on which Budapest depended for all its heavy transport. Hard on this Note came another from the French Colonel Vix, which ordered the Hungarians to give up large reaches of territory, Magyar by population and vital to their economic existence, which had been left to them under the Armistice. What was to be done? To submit to these two Notes meant ruin. To resist in isolation was equally ruin. One Power, however, still existed in Europe which had not bent to the victors. If Hungary could come to no understanding with the Entente, her obvious course was to turn to Russia, but Russia would be her ally only if she would herself enter the Moscow International and make an end of capitalism within her borders. Thus the fear of a bloody rising from below, the intolerable pressure of our blockade, and the dread of a harsh peace conceived by the French "policy of alliances" in the interests of the Rou­manians and the Tchechs, all conspired to make the Hungarian Revolution. It had, however, a more potent psychological cause. In the depths of despair the human instinct for self-preserva­tion cried out for a new hope. Patriotism was a spring broken by the intolerable strain of the war. Religion was an official convention linked with the old feudalism and the capitalist era. In the prudent schemes of opportunist politicians, who mixed a little reformist Socialism with middle-class Liberalism and the peasant view of land­ownership, there was no stimulus for mind or will. From the ruined past and the intolerable present, Hungary turned to Communism because its will could recover health only in gigantic effort of creation. There was nothing left that seemed worth conserving. Traditions, reverences, catch­words—they were all meaningless. Even of prop­erty there was little left to defend, for every man's wealth had shrunk by the fall of the ex­change to a fifth of its old value. One party had an energetic belief. There survived no force which could oppose it.

From the first the Revolution had on its side the organized manual workers of the towns, es­pecially the powerful trade union of metal work­ers, whose leader, Garbai, became the President of the Communist State. The poorer brain-work­ers, especially clerks of all grades, were scarcely less well-disposed, for they had become relatively more impoverished, during the war and the block­ade, than the hand-workers, who alone had con­trived to bring their wages into some distant rela­tion to the mounting prices. At a big and enthusi­astic Communist meeting for the German-speak­ing inhabitants of Budapest (they form about a quarter of the population) what chiefly impressed me was the intense respectability of the audience. Judging by appearances they seemed to be chiefly clerks, engineers, or skilled artisans, and the well-reasoned speeches made a special point of the edicts of the Soviet Government, which for the first time in history assured full liberty and en­couragement to the German schools, and promised them a theater of their own in the capital. It was by no means solely or even chiefly to the "ragged proletariat" that the new régime appealed. It was, indeed, welcomed, or at least tolerated, by the intensely chauvinistic Magyar patriots, largely because its resistance to the exactions of the Entente flattered their nationalism. There is little doubt that it profited in some degree from this half-conscious emotion of patriotism, but I must, in fairness, add that Bela Kun lost no op­portunity of disavowing any sentiment so old-fashioned. Again and again he declared officially that his Government attached no importance whatever to the historical integrity of Hungarian territory. If they should find themselves in con­flict with Roumanians or Tchechs, it would not be over racial or territorial issues, but because these capitalistic or feudal States were naturally at enmity with a proletarian Republic. Though I must not quote him as saying so, what I think was in Bela Kun's mind was that if Slovakia and Roumania were also to become friendly and per­haps federated Soviet Republics, the military and above all the economic difficulties of Soviet Hungary would automatically disappear. There would no longer be a menace on their frontiers, and the blockade would be replaced by an active exchange of goods. How far it was part of his policy to promote revolution actively among his neighbors I cannot say, but he was naturally too cautious to avow it. When I put the question to him point-blank, he answered that"Hungary had enough to do to save herself, without concerning herself with others." That answer would not have satisfied the semi-Socialist Government in Vienna, which was seriously alarmed by the ac­tivity of Hungarian Communist propaganda.

The spirit of order and authority which marked the Communist régime in Hungary reflected the remarkable personality of Bela Kun. Unflinch­ing in theory and bold in action, he had no liking for needless violence, and he detested disorder. At the first glance one was impressed by the vital­ity and self-possession of the man. He worked incessantly, and yet he kept a freshness of mind which never failed him when he gave his shrewd and logical yet always courteous answers to crit­ics. He is still a young man in his thirties, and was before the war a Socialist journalist as yet unknown to fame. As a junior officer of the reserve, he was taken prisoner dike the Austrian Foreign Secretary, Dr. Bauer) by the Russians, worked energetically as a Bolshevik in Petrograd, and came into close touch with Lenin. He was a faithful pupil of his master, and knew his mind intimately enough to avoid his earlier mistakes, It was, indeed, his ambition to apply at once the experience gained during the first eighteen months of Communist rule in Russia. His courage was already legendary, and, like Lenin, he is an opti­mist mist who never despairs. He was in Moscow dur­ing the rising of the Left Socialist Revolution­aries against the Bolsheviks. An armored motor­car, bristling with machine guns, came rush­ing down the street in which the Soviet head­quarters stood. Kun was unarmed, but he sallied out alone, walked straight to meet the car, jumped on the foot-board, and by sheer insistence, audac­ity, and magnetism overawed its crew. One by one they slunk away, and Bela Kun triumphantly drove the captured car to his own quarters. He was in prison in Budapest when Karolyi made way for the Revolution, and with his body still sore from a beating administered by his jailers he went straight from his dungeon to the Royal Palace on the hill. He improvised an understand­ing on behalf of the Communists with the much more numerous Social Democrats, and formed a mixed Socialist-Communist Government in which half the offices fell to his own group. His political difficulties were chiefly with the Communist Left Wing, which probably would have made a bloody terror but for his instinct of order and modera­tion. His Ministry, by the average of years, must have been one of the youngest that ever held power in Europe, but it had a presentable aca­demic record. No less than six of the thirty Commissioners were University Professors or lecturers.

The daring of the new administration was shown in its instant attack upon the problems of daily life. It had to cope with abnormal diffi­culties. Budapest was thronged with refugees and demobilized soldiers; some say that it had double its normal population. The Government instantly laid down the principle that every adult is entitled to one living room, and no family to more than three rooms, apart from the kitchen and rooms set aside for work. The homeless were promptly housed, and in many a palace the in­mates retired to the three rooms allowed to them by law. The British Labor Party announced as its motto at the last election, "No cake for any till all have bread." The billeting plans of the Hungarian Government were a drastic applica­tion of that principle. In practice it was carried out with reasonable consideration. Friends and relatives were encouraged to live together. On the amusing plea that the bourgeois would corrupt honest workers, families of the same habits of life were grouped together. A certain professor of the University, with a family of three, had five large rooms—two too many. One was allowed him as a study, and the official who dealt with his case suggested to him that he should bring his secretary to inhabit the fifth room. That illustra­tion exhibits the policy of the administration. It was friendly to men and women of the middle class who contributed anything to society by their work. If it was inclined to be harsh, it was only to the idle and unproductive rich. Clothing was no less scarce than house-room, and no new stocks could be imported. In each block of flats the tenants were required to elect trustees who must counter­sign their applications for new clothes or furni­ture and grant them only in case of actual need. These are only a few instances of the drastic measures which the People's Commissaries adop­ted to deal with an abnormal condition of scarcity-They make on the whole for the good of the great­est number. In nothing perhaps did the Com­missioners act so firmly as in the instant and total prohibition of all alcoholic drink. There is no evasion of that command. Hungary is obedi­ently ".dry," and to this even more than to the firmly disciplined Red Guards it owes order. This prohibition of drink involved a drastic med­dling with social habits. In some other respects, however, the Government showed a prudent mod­eration. Though it forbade priests and pastors to preach on political questions, it was prompt in stopping any attacks of its own too anti-clerical supporters upon the religious liberty of the Church. It also postponed (after publishing a draft edict) legislation for the reform of marriage and divorce. Readers who may have heard the far from amusing joke that Bolsheviks "nation­alize women" will be interested to learn that they closed the brothels of Budapest. Prostitution, as Bela Kun put it, is a typical institution of capital­ism. Their most unpopular measure was prob­ably the requisitioning of all jewels and plate, over

a. certain minimum value. That was done pri­marily to provide an article of export, or a basis for credit, so soon as the blockade should be lifted and trade resumed. "Liquid" private property, in the shape of bank balances, was not confiscated when the banks were nationalized, but a limit of 2,000 kronen (£25 at the exchange then ruling) per month was placed on the amount which might be drawn from any one account. That was a tactical measure, designed to hinder the free use of wealth for counter-revolutionary designs.

The test question for any form of Socialism in Hungary lies beyond the boundaries of the towns. They were ripe for the change. The rural popu­lation, however, was still conservative and clerical. The younger peasants may have been shaken somewhat out of the conservatism of their class by the war, but their elders, half of them illiterate, cling tenaciously to the idea of private ownership. The former Government proposed to break up the vast latifundia into small farms, and on Count Karolyi's own estate the partition had actually begun. Socialism could have no future outside the towns if that policy were carried out, and the peasants would necessarily form a preponderant conservative propertied class. Everywhere in Eastern Europe the day of the big feudal land­lord is over, but whether he shall be succeeded by the small peasant owner is not yet settled. In Prussia, the half-Socialist Government has shirked the question, and has given the owners of big estates two years in which to break them up voluntarily without legislative interference. In Poland the Socialists do not venture to oppose the individualist peasant program. In Russia, though a law of nationalization has been enacted, it has been found impossible to cope with the peas­ant instinct of ownership, and in practice national­ization differs little from a system of small hold­ings. In Hungary the Socialists were more alive to the danger of multiplying owners, and they had contrived during the winter to delay the exe­cution of the Karolyi program of compulsory subdivision. They held that the big estates in Hungary, often leased to limited companies, would lend themselves readily to a system of communal ownership and co-operative working. Even be­fore the Revolution the Socialists in some counties started an active campaign of education among the landless workers of the great estates. The argument was simple and convincing. One might divide the land but one could not break up the im­mense model cattle-sheds with their perfect equip­ment. I saw some of these estates in Somogy County. There was electric light and hygi­enic drainage in the byres; the workers' cottages had neither. Then if gains must be shared under communism, so also must risks, and the Hungarian peasant has reason to dread the sudden local storms of hail. He readily understood the case for communizing engines and steam plows, and even before the Revolution, on one great estate near Kaposvar the laborers, under the influence of the local Socialist party, themselves formed a co-operative society to work the estate, instead of subdividing it.

In any event the peasants realized that the end of March was no time for a destructive experi­ment, for the fields called for the sower. In the first days of the Revolution a plan of organiza­tion was rapidly worked out by the Commissioner for Agriculture, Dr. Hamburger, a country doctor with a high record for revolutionary courage, who stepped out of prison like so many of his col­leagues, to wield a dictator's power.^{1 1}During the winter of 1917-18, Dr. Hamburger was in com­mand of a Red Cross contingent, in a small town behind the line of the Italian front, which happened to be a vital railway junction. During the Brest negotiations, when Trotsky called on the workers of the Central Powers to strike, Dr. Hamburger was the first to respond. He had great influence with the men of his own contingent, and also with the railway workers. Not only did they give the signal for the strike (which the Socialists of Vienna promptly obeyed), they even proclaimed a local Soviet Government in their area, and for some time held up the military communications, by way of compelling the Austro-Hungarian Government to make a peace on the basis of "no annexations, no indemnities." When the movement was suppressed, Dr. Ham­burger, in spite of a promise to the contrary, was arrested and imprisoned until the Revolution released him. On each great estate over 200 acres (the limit is only pro­visional, and may vary in each district) the entire working staff from steward to milkmaid is formed into a permanent guild or society. The only con­dition of membership is the obligation to work at least 120 days in the year—a low minimum which is intended to lure the neighboring owners of small "uneconomic" holdings (as half-time workers) into these agricultural guilds. The maintenance of the workers is a first charge upon the produce of the communal farm. Each family will receive a ration of grain, meat, dairy produce, and vegetables according to the number of its mem­bers. The surplus product is then bought by the district central agricultural association, which is in its turn subordinate to a county association, and to the Ministry.

In these new organizations there are centralized the purchase of seeds, manures, machines, and the sale of produce to the town populations of Hun­gary. This centralization will make for economy and efficiency in all the industries subsidiary to agriculture, from the making of butter to the manufacture of beet sugar. It will be an obliga­tion on the societies to expend half of each year's surplus on improvements—a term which covers the building of decent dwellings for the working members of the society as well as the purchase of machinery. The remaining half of the surplus is distributed in time wages to the working members of the community, and is the inducement which will stimulate them to work their best for as many days in the year as possible. I had a full oppor­tunity, during a memorable visit to the little county town and district of Kaposvar, of seeing all these novel institutions in the company of Dr. Hamburger, during the first weeks of the experi­ment It is a rich and smiling country, of rolling hills, deep pasture, and pleasant woodland. The meadows on these April days were gay with cow­slips and ladies' smocks. We drove from farm to farm in a "socialized" carriage which had be­longed to the absentee millionaire noble, who owned half the county. I could see that all the mechanism of these great estates was running smoothly, from the dairies, the breeding studs, and light railway to the clean, well-tilled fields, with the wheat already in vigorous growth. I wit­nessed the immense popularity of Dr. Hamburger in the little town, and found among the officials of local agricultural organization several who talked English, French, or German, and explained to me all their far-reaching plans for the improve­ment of buildings, roads, light railways and manu­facturing processes. One of them, by the way, was a ci-devant Count, whose Socialism had led him long ago to give up his own lands, and to work with his own hands as a laborer. The little town seethed with ambition, hope, and enthusiasm, and every one believed that they would soon realize all the predictions of Kropotkin, by enhancing the productivity of the soil. My ignorance of Mag­yar was, however, a fatal handicap in preventing me from talking directly to the peasants. Enthu­siasts are rarely good judges of other people's state of mind, and I discounted what the Socialists themselves told me. I was, however, lucky in finding an intelligent man who spoke German, who retained his strong individualist opinion, and had been the leader of the local peasant-owners' oppo­sition to Socialism. I asked him what the laborers were thinking. He summed up their view as fol­lows; "They care nothing for the theory or ideals of Socialism, but they are attracted by the prom­ises of the leaders. At present they are disposed to work heartily and will give the experiment a chance. If these promises are kept, if they see new and healthy cottages built, if they get what they never had before, free medical attendance and well-organized schools, if they see that the former gains of the absentee capitalist-landlord are flowing into their own pockets, they will re­main firm supporters of the system." From a hostile but capable witness this was favorable testimony.

The constitution of these rural workers' guilds reflects the wisdom hardly gained from the early experience of Bolshevik Russia. The autonomy of the workers allows them a certain initiative and control, but the final authority is the central bureaucracy. Each estate (they average 10,000 to 20,000 acres) elects its own workers' soviet, and this in turn chooses a managing committee of three. Side by side with this elected authority there is, however, a manager appointed by the district organization. He is usually the bailiff of the old aristocratic landlord. These men were experts, and against all the traditions of their class they have rallied to Socialism. Feudalism received its death-blow in the war. The alterna­tive was the partition of the estates among the laborers. That would have meant the end of the stewards' profession, and to-day one may see these men, with their half-aristocratic, half-para­sitic manners, wearing a red button in their coats, and serving their new masters with all their ha­bitual correctitude. The steward has the right to veto the decisions of the elected authority, and all its plans and budgets go with his independent reports to the omnipotent central authority.

Agriculture in these vast estates is already a typical modern industry, which dominated a rural proletariat by the power of its concentrated capi­tal. This field is ripe for socialization. Outside it lies the antique world of the peasant—a term which covers the small farmer who hires labor, the peasant who makes a living by the labor of his family from his own ten acres, and finally the struggling small-holder who gains a half-exist­ence from his own inadequate plot, and ekes it out by his work as a hireling for richer men. Towards this intensely conservative peasant world the policy of Communist Hungary will be the minimum of interference. There will be in the villages no socialization of houses or of land. The small owner will struggle on as before. If he is adaptable, he will himself create a voluntary co-operative system. If he is conservative, he will fail to compete with the great industry of the socialized estates. He will have to pay a fixed minimum wage for his hired labor, and if all goes well, the attraction of life on these comfortable self-governing estates will raise the requirements of his hands. He will hardly survive this genera­tion, but meanwhile the intention is that no village shall be "socialized" until it calls for the change. The lesson of Russia has been learned. One can­not force the pace of a peasant's thinking.^{1 1} In spite of this cautious policy I gather that the communist state has had grave difficulties with the peasants. As in Russia, our blockade tells fatally against the experiment. The peasant finds that there is nothing to buy in exchange for his produce. He receives paper for it, but paper will purchase little, partly because nothing can be imported and partly because local in­dustries are lamed for lack of raw materials. As a result, it has become very difficult to provision Budapest, which in April was not really, when compared with Vienna, or even with Berlin, seriously short of food. The city lives on the country, but the city unable to work has nothing to give in exchange. There is no cure for this state of things until the blockade is lifted. The blockade, of course, is maintained with the deliberate intention of destroying a Socialist experiment. His mind, however, will be formed in the next genera­tion in the village schools. They were the strong­hold of the Church. They are now the advance-posts of the Socialist State.

Industry has been reorganized on similar lines. Like the absentee landlord, the sleeping partner and the shareholder disappear without compensa­tion. As a rule the capitalist, who himself con­ducted his own business, remains at the maximum monthly salary recognized by communism (3,000 kronen), as a consulting expert. A People's Com­missioner (Minister) receives no more. In mines and factories, in so far as the lack of raw ma­terials due to the blockade allows them to work, the men elect their own soviet, as in the rural guilds. It is a small body with a maximum of seven members. It nominates a manager, but he re­ceives his definite appointment from the Ministry of Production, which alone is competent to dismiss him. As in the country, so in the urban indus­tries, this constitution shows a balance of author­ity. The workers have a vastly larger sphere of self-government than the most liberal form of capitalism allowed, but the final authority lies with the state. It is the Central Soviet Govern­ment, and not the Factory Council, which fixes the scale of wages. There is no risk that the ex­travagant period of self-indulgence which ruined industry in the early days of Russian communism will be repeated in Hungary. There it is undoubt­edly intelligence which rules. I visited a great factory at Budapest, one of the biggest and best of its kind in Europe, which makes electric lamps, telephones, and telegraphic apparatus. The soviet consisted of three scientific and four manual work­ers, including a woman, and its function was mainly to deal with cases of discipline. The manager was a former engineer of the works, a man, obviously, of ability and good sense. Three former directors were employed, at high salaries, as consultative experts: the other three, who had been mere financiers, ceased to be connected with the works. All the infinitely skilful work of this vast organism went on as before, with this differ­ence, however, on which workmen and managers both insisted, that men and women alike worked with more spirit, more conscience, more honesty than before. As usual in Budapest, a fair propor­tion of the workmen of all grades spoke German, and I talked with several of them. They all said the same thing, each in his own way. "We feel that the place belongs to us now." "We are working for ourselves and not for an exploiter." So far from taking less pride in their work, they took more. I saw a telephonic switchboard of a new automatic pattern which one of the men had just invented. The model had been made since the Revolution, and the factory was proud to think that it would better its past record. "What strikes me most," said an English engineer from Birmingham, who had worked in this factory for eleven years,"is that all the little dishonesties of the past have stopped. The men have a keener conscience in their work." In point of fact, the output of the factory, which had fallen off seri­ously during the misery and unrest of the Karolyi period, was rising again, and rapidly nearing the pre-war standard. None the less, I think the Com­missioners (Ministers) must have been anxious lest production should, generally, drop. They were proposing to introduce not only piecework but the Taylor system.

After three weeks one cannot speak of the achievements of Hungarian Communism; one can only describe its plans. Of these the most ambi­tious center around education. The Minister, or Commissioner, Dr. Lukacs, a former lecturer in philosophy at Heidelberg, combines imagination with courage. He means to achieve this immense end, that culture shall cease to be the privilege of a class. The drudges of the old world, the teach­ers, have suddenly become the most honored serv­ants of the state, and even the village school­master will receive the maximum salary of 3,000 crowns a month. A uniform salary is to be paid to all teachers, from the university to the village school. The school age will be raised to sixteen and presently to eighteen years, and every boy and girl will have such further education, technical or scientific, as his capacity may merit. Dr. Lukacs hopes to recruit his corps of teachers from the ranks of the academically educated men and women, especially the lawyers, whom the Revolu­tion has placed temporarily among the unem­ployed. Meanwhile, he is organizing courses which will enable the more capable adult manual workers to fit themselves for scientific work. One year will be spent at the charge of the state in completing their general education, and thereafter they will follow specialized courses in engineering, architecture, or chemistry. The intention is to break down the barrier which has confined the pro­letarian to the routine work of his craft.

This is not all. Artists whose achievement de­serves the distinction, will, by a vote of a college of their peers, be maintained at the public charge to continue their productive work. To me, I con­fess, this scheme seems a deplorable and thought­less check upon the artists' liberty and individu­ality. This Academy might begin in a revolution­ary mood, but it must soon become a clique intol­erant of any merit which deviates from its stand­ards. The results for all the arts, for literature and for pioneer thought in science or philosophy, must be equally unfortunate, unless in some way a free career is opened to individual talent. Pic­tures of high merit in private ownership have been "socialized," and four hundred of them added to the nation's collections. The theaters, and even the cinemas, are also socialized, and Dr. Lukacs has boldly suppressed the more trivial type of performance, and raised the standard of the Buda­pest repertories, while lowering the price of the seats to workmen. Two plays by Bernard Shaw were being acted while I was in Budapest, and both of them were crowded. The policy of the Government is to please the masses by offering them the fullest satisfaction of their esthetic ca­pacities. The amazing and creditable thing is that in music, and in the theater, it insists on a high standard, which the untrained mass will certainly find exacting. Here too, as in the schools, there is work for the expropriated class. One has heard it said of Soviet Russia, that at one stage of the Revolution educated men and women were re­duced to selling matches or newspapers in the streets. If that were true, it would be a condem­nation of the whole spirit of the system. Hun­gary, on the other hand, was eager to find work for its "intellectuals."

This picture of Hungary in the first weeks of social revolution would be false if it failed to em­phasize the fact that the government is an un­mixed dictatorship. There is no liberty for the Press, or for any political agitation or organiza­tion outside the Socialist ranks. The old news­papers all continue to appear, but they all play the correct official tune.^{1 1}There were, I believe, two exceptions, one of them a weekly feminist paper and the other a monthly review, which were allowed considerable latitude. Lenin is fond of saying that the liberty of the press is a bourgeois ideal, conceived in the inter­ests of capital: it means the domination of opinion by wealth. In Russia, non-Bolshevik parties, which have ceased to attempt to overthrow the Soviet régime by force, are now being licensed, one by one, and allowed to set up their own daily press. They are tolerated, in short, when they cease to be a danger, No criticism even of de­tails is tolerated, and even in the churches, priests and pastors are forbidden to touch on politics. It is true that an election has been held to constitute the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils. The fran­chise includes every productive worker, manual or intellectual, with women occupied in the house­hold tasks of their families. A large percentage of those who vote are men and women who used in the old days to rank in the "middle class." Excluded are all who do no productive work, all who live by the toil of others, and (rather strangely) the clergy. Work in the Socialist State is the only source of value, and Communism has its own political adaptation of the Pauline maxim: if a man will not work neither shall he vote. The exclusion tells harshly where it strikes at the small farmer, or the owner of a little work­shop (the smaller businesses are not "social­ized"), who all work as managers, though they also employ and often exploit others. The fran­chise is, however, only a temporary grievance: this excluded class will soon be absorbed in the general body of workers. What admits of no de­fense is the method of election, which was carried out under a state of siege in which no opposition could organize effectively. In each district from sixty to eighty members had to be chosen. The lists were prepared by the Socialist party caucus, and though one might strike out names, this per­mission was of no practical use. Rival lists were rarely presented, and even then offered only a narrow choice. The voting was on the majority, not the proportional system, and of course, the of­ficial list everywhere triumphed. It would have been an honester course to allow the party to nominate the Soviets without the pretense of election.

A temporary dictatorship of this type may be defended as a necessary expedient during a sharp, brief crisis. The excuse for it is that the Entente, by the blockade and by its encouragement of counter-revolutionary emigres, was actively work­ing against the Revolution. It will destroy Hun­gary intellectually and morally if it is continued for more than a very few months. It is not in fact so much the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as the dictatorship of a single party, which happens to be the one political organization in Hungary that has survived the war. A country which has never known even a distant approach to democ­racy does not resent it as a western people would do. It should be noted, however, that the control by the Soviets, once elected by this rather unsat­isfactory process, over the Commissioners, was adequate, and much firmer than that of most Parliaments over Ministers. There is certainly no force outside the Socialist Party which can overthrow it. The landlords and capitalists lack the numbers: the peasants have neither the arms nor the organization. If freedom is to emerge in the near future, it can come, after the foreign enemy has ceased to meddle and blockade, only by a spontaneous movement from within the Socialist movement itself.

I should convey a false impression if I allowed the reader to suppose that the men who are actu­ally working this dictatorship regard it as any­thing but a momentary phase, a necessary evil en­dured for the rapid achievement of a great end. Behind the men of action who really made the Revolution, there stood a most interesting group of thinkers and writers who call themselves (after Galileo) the Galileans, Their passion is intellec­tual freedom. One of them, a man who talked with rare distinction and a touch of genius (he is a high official of the new régime) explained his po­sition thus: "I am not, in my ultimate view of life, a Socialist, or a Communist. We Galileans have gone beyond the materialism of Marx. But we realize that the destruction of the capitalist sys­tem is the first condition for the world's freedom of thought. We shall carry that out, with ruthless logic. We shall tolerate anything in the interval save a sabotage of the intellect." "But," said I, "surely this Dictatorship, which destroys all criti­cism even of details, which forbids liberty of speech, press, association, is just such sabotage?" "It will be," he answered, "if it goes on too long. It is we intellectuals who suffer most severely from it, for it is our free thinking that it represses, but we are ready to endure it—f or a time. It is neces­sary only so long as we dread overthrow by the Entente. Save us from that, and we will instantly create full liberty." "But tell me," I asked, "are you really at ease? Is there no predatory element in all this Communising? How many of the Red Army are idealists, and how many are robbers?" "Christ," came the answer, "was crucified be­tween two thieves. There is a criminal instinct in all societies, in all men. Capitalism legalized it, confined it, dug channels of profiteering for it. Our task is to destroy it, by evolving a stronger social passion. Shall we succeed? Sometimes I think we are nearing such a time as the Roman Empire passed through in the barbarian inva­sions. The war has shattered more than the Central Empires. It has shattered society itself. Only a new faith, a new principle can save it. We Galileans mean to work like one of the old religi­ous orders, with obedience, asceticism, poverty. No lesser effort, no uninspiring compromise could save us. Perhaps we shall fail. Perhaps civili­zation will go under. We know the risks."

This hasty sketch of an immense effort is based on the firm belief that Communism, as I have seen it in Hungary, is a principle of constructive order, which errs rather on the side of excessive author­ity than on the side of anarchy. Its makers are men of action, who have taken into partnership with them some thinkers and students whose ability and disinterestedness no one questions. The test of the system will be in its ability to work—at first without adequate public criticism—an im­mense governing machine efficiently and without corruption. For the moment it promises well. The energy, the faith, the will are there. Without its adventurous experiment, a sick society, robbed of all social and historical ambition, must have vegetated and rotted under the conditions of strangulation imposed by the victors, as unhappy Austria will vegetate and rot. Bela Kun may have his successor as leader.^{1 1} As I am passing the proofs, comes the news of Bela Kun's fall. For three months his government had been engaged in incessant war with the Tchecho-Slovaks and the Roumanians who have acted as the army of the allies. Victorious over the former, it fell when the latter were within twenty miles of Budapest. A purely Social Democratic Cabinet, pledged to maintain the accomplished measures of socialization, but also to call a Constituent Assembly, has succeeded the mixed Socialist-Communist régime. It can he only a brief transitional phase, leading to further reaction under further foreign pressure. The Socialist Party may evolve in various tendencies. But short of a violent external intervention, an attack organ­ized in Paris by Roumanians or Tchechs, the great estates, the large factories and the banks, are as little likely as the posts and the railways to revert to private ownership. At a heavy cost to per­sonal liberty, and with much inevitable hardship to individuals, the immense transformation has been achieved, without disorder, by a single stroke. If freedom is eclipsed for a moment, the destruction of the capitalist system makes for the first time in a modern state the only condition under which real autonomy is conceivable, whether for the will or for the intellect. Hungary builds upon ruins, but the authors of the destruction were the makers of the war. To chaos and despair a living idea has brought the stimulus of a cre­ative hope.

Vienna, April 21, 1919.